Room of Mother
by Elli Danger
Summary: Eileen learns what it truly means to be the Mother Reborn. Post-"21 Sacraments" ending.


The boy foisted another book on Eileen before climbing onto the couch next to her. Honestly, it wasn't a book so much as a small stack of yellowed, slightly crumpled paper with a crudely glued-together spine. She scooted a few inches to the left to make more room for the child, which he took as an invitation to nuzzle against her. Henry, as always, sat rigidly on the other end of the couch, staring at the opposite wall where something squirmed and moaned beneath puckered plaster. He'd been like that since Eileen 'woke up', not moving or speaking (or breathing), just a familiar face to keep her complacent. That was Walter Sullivan's gift to her.

She'd touched Henry a number of times to try and get his attention; to shake him out of whatever trance he had succumbed to. His skin was warm and held a healthy pigment, but there was no tensing of muscle or ebb and flow of life just below the surface. After an indeterminable number of days, Eileen gave up. The only thing that made the situation worse was that she could not summon tears. Walter had given her Henry, but denied her grief. It welled up inside of her like a sickness.

Now, Eileen cracked the old book open with a tired sigh. This had been going on for ages, in this hazy parallel netherworld where time crawled to a stop: she'd finish one story, cover to cover, and the boy, Walter, would pick another from the shelf while the man, Walter, watched silently from the shadowy corners of room 302. He was always there even if he wasn't present, and nothing occurred without him knowing about it.

He was the provider. The god of this new realm. The apartment, and possibly the rest of South Ashfield Heights, existed independently from reality. Everything that Eileen was once familiar with – the sounds of traffic, the rumble of the subway and the faulty neon signs – were considered excessive and immediately done away with.

"Paradise," Walter had called it with a questionable smile.

But Paradise meant the Before was irrelevant, and the details of Eileen's former life slipped further and further away from her. She couldn't remember the last time she was hungry or sleepy; the last movie she'd seen; the last person she spoke to on the phone. Her favorite color was now the waxy red crayon mess that illustrated the book in her hands.

She had even largely forgotten the incident that sucked her into Walter's twisted world to begin with, and the deeply rooted desire she had to live, to survive. To _escape._ She and Henry railed against the Hell that was destined for them, but it was all beginning to melt into an indefinable blur of rust, blood and fear. With each passing moment, a key piece of her memory sloughed off, swirled briefly in the soft light that shone through the window, like a dust particle, then vanished forever.

If Henry was Walter's gift to her, Eileen's gift to him was the abdication of her memories. Dying didn't fulfill her role as the Mother Reborn, it merely provided Walter with a blank template. He could feed her his ideals until she became what he sought after all those years. And there would come a time, sooner than she'd expect, when Eileen wouldn't recall being anything else.

"Don't you want to do something else?" she asked the boy, fixing red-rimmed eyes on him. "We could color or play a game."

He shook his head and, in the same moment, a voice rang out from elsewhere in the apartment. Mild, somewhat detached and with a barely contained giddiness not befitting a grown man.

"Please, Ms. Galvin. It's my favorite." Young Walter gave an emphatic nod in agreement.

Eileen glanced over the boy's head toward Henry who continued to stare unblinkingly at the wall before flipping back to the first page of the book and wetting her lips. "'There once was a baby and a mother who were connected by a magical cord'..." Her voice was growing hoarse, but even if it wore thin to the point of whispers, she'd go on. Even after young Walter drifted off to sleep with his thumb in his mouth, she'd keep reading, because some ears never closed.

* * *

><p>AN: Whew! My first _SH4_ fic in a very long time. This was inspired by Xelias' exquisite story "Ghost Town" and my own love of downer endings. Thanks for reading!


End file.
